Some say the media has done a less-than-stellar job of reporting on the Occupy Wall Street protests these last few weeks, but the 99 percent found a way to circumvent that: They published and distributed their own newspaper Saturday, aptly named The Occupied Wall Street Journal. (more)

There might have been a changing of the guard among the top editors at the News of the World in recent months, but the British tabloid, part of the Murdoch family media dynasty, is going off the presses for good this weekend after a hacking scandal ... (more)

Showing rare devotion to the craft of journalism, lifelong staffers at The Musalman in Chennai, India, have been publishing a daily newspaper penned in Urdu calligraphy since 1927. The kicker? No one has ever quit the paper ... (more)

Let’s try this again, shall we? The New York Times has experimented in the past with the idea of charging for content, and starting later this month the Grey Lady is launching a new pay-to-play plan and squirreling most of what’s fit to print behind a firewall.

Big changes are afoot at The Boston Globe, The Washington Post and other relics of the bygone print media era in their aggressive effort to retain the handful of actual newspaper readers they still may have. This is one of those moments when the Onion ... (continued)

A Danish newspaper that published a cartoon of the Prophet Muhammad wearing a bomb-shaped turban has apologized for offending Muslims. The penitence was part of a settlement between the paper and eight Muslim groups. The apology has been denounced by other members of the Danish media, which previously stood united in rejecting calls to back down in the face of Islamic outrage over the cartoon.

After two tumultuous years in the media business, Tribune Co.’s controversial CEO, Chicago-based real estate mogul Sam Zell, is stepping down from his post, but he’s not bowing out of the game altogether—Zell will continue as the media company’s chairman.

Two men from Chicago were arrested recently for allegedly plotting to attack overseas targets, including the Danish newspaper that sparked a huge controversy in 2006 by running the now-infamous cartoon of the prophet Mohammed sporting an explosive turban.

For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the Internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?

Are we entering an age in which the electronic image, endowed with the ability to manufacture its own reality, is hurling us into a state of collective self-delusion? Welcome to a brave new post-literate world where we confuse how we are made to feel with knowledge.

Being popular and Internet-savvy, writer Dan Froomkin surely holds a place in today’s struggling newspaper business that’s secure. At least that’s what you’d think. Instead, The Washington Post has fired him. The move removes one of the only mainstream commentators to criticize Barack Obama from the left.

We have gone through other periods when great newspapers succumbed to new economic realities. Most American cities once had three, four or more competing dailies; now, most are down to just one. But those earlier rounds of attrition were exercises in survival of the fittest. The difference now is that newspapers are in trouble no matter how fit they are.

An obvious Photoshop job in Israel has hilariously tried to make Israel’s inaugural Cabinet a bit more Orthodox. In one ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspaper, two female Cabinet members were cropped out of an official picture and replaced with two non-Cabinet men.

The death knell has been sounded for the Rocky Mountain News, E.W. Scripps’ Denver-area newspaper, which is scheduled to close after Friday’s edition is churned out, no doubt signaling more mayhem to come in the old media world.

On Monday, the paper of record published an e-mail from the mayor of Paris slamming Caroline Kennedy’s political maneuvering as “appalling.” Unfortunately, the Times failed to check whether the message was authentic—it wasn’t. Guess that explains all those articles by Nigerian princes.

I’m concerned about the uncertain future for journalists. Without them, who will “watchdog” politicians and bureaucrats, charity officials, cops, educators and the many others who help make our society run?

While John McCain is still searching for a reason he should be president, he has a new reason Barack Obama shouldn’t be: The Illinois senator once had dinner with a Palestinian. Or, as McCain sees it, he attended a terrorist convention with a PLO spokesman and William Ayers.

The oft-repeated narrative of print news going to the pits has gained another protagonist, as the century-old Christian Science Monitor recently decided to cease its daily print edition, banking now on the Internet as its key distribution mechanism.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert isn’t exactly popular these days. Forced to resign in disgrace, it may have been with the weight of politics leaving his shoulders that he let loose during an interview with an Israeli newspaper. Among other revelations, Olmert said his country was stuck in a 1948 mind-set and must now give up virtually all contested territory—including Jerusalem and the West Bank.

For 33 years, the Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review has brought the literary world to the doorstep of the nation’s largest book-buying community. That era is about to end, a fact that disturbs the section’s former editors who have written this formal protest.

Los Angeles Times Publisher David Hiller is best known for firing people. Now Hiller himself is out of a job. The ousting was announced as the Times braced for another devastating round of staff cuts. Meantime, the editor of another Sam Zell-owned newspaper, the Chicago Tribune, announced her resignation as that paper continues its own gutting.

Sam Zell seems to get a kick out of antagonizing his critics, some of his own reporters among them, but this time the Tribune Co. boss has really outdone himself. Zell has announced a new model for his newspapers: 50 percent news and 50 percent ads. At the Los Angeles Times, that will mean 82 fewer pages of news every week.

If ever there was required reading, this article by Sherry Ricchiardi in the American Journalism Review would be it. News coverage about the Iraq war, whether measured in column inches or broadcast minutes, by American news outlets is becoming a mere blip on the proverbial radar, even as lives and resources are still lost every day.

Not many people pay attention to judicial elections, especially one held in June, and it’s for that reason that some Angelenos are worried about the campaign of William Johnson. A white separatist, Johnson is apparently counting on a lack of attention and the support of Ron Paul’s local organization to help him to victory.

This just in: The Washington Post is the latest major newspaper to undergo the apparently inevitable newsroom downsizing process, clearing out 100 more journalists with a “blunt instrument,” as former Post (and former New York Times) writer Sharon Waxman reports in her WaxWord blog. “The Washington Post as I know it has jumped the shark,” Waxman laments.

Rupert Murdoch just can’t get enough of the New York newspaper scene. The News Corp. mogul, already in possession of the New York Post and The Wall Street Journal, has worked out a deal to buy Newsday for about half a billion dollars. That paper is currently owned by another salty media tyrant, Sam Zell.

Wall Street Journal Managing Editor Marcus Brauchli is said to be leaving his post after 24 years at the paper—an unexpected development that media-watchers are attributing to conflict over new owner Rupert Murdoch’s plans for the newspaper.

There was the Jason Blair scandal, the Judith Miller WMD fiasco, the John McCain (yawn) brouhaha and the appointment of neocon “never-get-it-right” William Kristol as an Op-Ed columnist, to mention a few New York Times blunders. All that and a shareholders’ assault make the Sulzbergers’ lock on ownership of The New York Times seem not entirely impregnable, explains Vanity Fair’s Michael Wolff.

It’s been a lively week in the newspaper world, and the excitement hasn’t exactly been of the desirable variety. Earlier in the week, Tribune Co. Chairman and CEO Sam Zell announced major cutbacks at Tribune papers across the country, and then The New York Times’ Valentine’s Day edition brought word that the Gray Lady will also be downsizing its staff.

Chicago-based billionaire and Tribune Co. honcho Sam Zell doesn’t take too kindly to uppity ink-stained wretches reminding him about what’s important in the newspaper business besides the bottom line. Here, an Orlando Sentinel journo grapples with him in a lively exchange that ends with Zell letting fly with an F-bomb.

Change is afoot at the Wall Street Journal. As of Wednesday, mega-mogul Rupert Murdoch is just a day shy of officially owning The Journal (although shareholders haven’t officially signed off on the sale yet), but he’s already looming large at the paper’s Dow Jones & Co. headquarters.

Although coverage of books in major newspapers may seem to have taken a precipitous downturn in recent months, this decline has been in the works for a while, says longtime writer, literary editor and book aficionado Steve Wasserman, who opines in this CJR article about the high costs of this lamentable cultural sea change.

Outgoing British Prime Minister Tony Blair, who ought to know a thing or two about the topic, says the relationship between the media and public figures of various stripes has deteriorated of late, owing in part to the proliferation of broadcast, online and print outlets, the decline of the newspaper industry, and an insatiable need to create “impact” at all costs.